HELP: Recovering Family Photos (JPG's) from crashed disk

Help...OF course I wasn't backed up and my system suffered a BSOD, unable to boot the system until I reloaded XP (without re-formatting), lot's of stuff not working correctly, including paging files. Need to reimage, have found most of my software disks, backed up to DVD of everything I could recover, BUT.....

I'm wondering if I can make one last attemt on these JPG's. Lots of famly history, etc. All of the jpg's are "there", i.e. file name's appear in a folder, but when I attempt to view a folder's contents in "thumbnail" mode, about 1/3 aren't accessible by windows picture viewer. If I click on the actual file, I get a message "No Preview Available" Seems like something got toasted in those files. Before I reformat C: and lose any remnants on the drive, I was wondering if there is anything I can try to recover more of these JPG files?? OR maybe another utility that can recover a corrupted JPG?

i use a program called file scavenger it worked very well....hopefully you don't have a crashed hard drive that won't spin...if so...try putting it in the freezer for a few hours...and plugging it in....that usually works...

The HDD-regenerator only works if the heads are still OK on that disk, and it will be money well spent.
You can also first try to put your wonky HD in another PC as a slave. Then try to copy those photos over onto that PCs master-disk, without trying to look at them first.
Chances are they will come out fine. If not, run HDD-Regenerator.

Can that be real?? I mean all the way back to my DOS days with diskscan, there were always some bad sectors? I didn't buy it, I tried thefree version just to see what it picked up? It seems like an odd outcome to me??

By the looks of it, your file-system (NTFS?) is screwed up, in that the 'links' to various files are messed up. That is not for HDD-Regenerator, which revives bad sectors.
Try that disk in another PC as I suggested earlier.

The HDD-regenerator only works if the heads are still OK on that disk, and it will be money well spent.

Click to expand...

HDD Regenerator is friggin' expensive. If you are going to buy it, it pays to visit Froogle, PriceGrabber, Deprice and eBay. It got 10% off mine from Deprice
(http://www.deprice.com/hddregenerator.htm) but that was a one week sale.
Shopping.Com might be a good place to look for a discount as well.

I bought mine from dposoft direct for $45.- but that is November 2003.
Free updates.
Still a lot cheaper than buying a new harddisk, and it can be used on any disk, now and in the future. It saved 3 harddisks for me sofar, I won't call that expensive.
Compared with $1500.- and up for 'professional' HD-recovery, it is dirt-cheap.